What types of relationship does each of your customer segments expect you to establish and maintain?

Revenue Streams

For what value are your customers really willing to pay?

For what do they currently pay?

How are they paying?

How would they prefer to pay?

How does each revenue stream contribute to overall revenue?

Key Activities

What key activities do you need to undertake to deliver on the five areas above?

Key Resources

What key resources do you need to deliver on the first five areas above?

Key Partners

Who are your key partners?

Who are your key suppliers?

Which key resources are you acquiring from partners?

Which key activities do partners perform?

Cost Structure

What are the most important costs inherent in your business model?

Which key resources are most expensive?

Which key activities are most expensive?

Creating a Pitch

You are encouraged to play an active role in the marketing effort. The Innovation Institute will work closely with you to help to develop your value proposition into a very concise and simply worded description of your innovation and the business opportunity it provides. Some people refer to such a description as an elevator pitch.

As the name suggests, the premise is simple: You get into an elevator with a potentially valuable industry partner or investor. Now you have the time it takes to ride an elevator to capture that person’s interest in your innovation and your value proposition, along with what you need to succeed.

The pitch should include the following:

Brief description of your innovation (non-confidential and in layman’s terms);

Problem that your innovation solves;

Market potential;

Comparison to existing solutions;

Explanation of the development stage of your innovation; and

Status of any intellectual property protection you have received to date.

Building Your Team

There is no recipe book for how you go to idea to a startup but along the way you will find that building a team and finding mentors that can help your startup or small business with business decisions is a vital, often overlooked aspect. Luckily, there are several resources here at Pitt that can help. Our mentors and consultants vary in expertise from marketing, finance, engineering, and more.

Dividing Ownership of the Company

Once you and your team have made the decision to create a startup, an early question is focused on how to divide the shares. The default answer is take the number of shares and divide by the number of founders. This implies that everyone to this point who is an owner of the startup contributed equally. This is rarely the case. While it may seem simple – later when real money is involved – this easy choice may lead to a lot of unhappiness.

Frank Demmler created a methodology and tool to address dividing the founder’s pie.